Henry David Thoreau Quotes

Give me civilization. I don't want to be pampered.

My interest in society - at times so pronounced that the word 'snob' comes a little to mind - derives from the fact that I like an immense number of things which society, money, and position bring in their train: painting, tapestries, rare books, smart dresses, dances, gardens, country houses, correct cuisine, and pretty women.

I do not connect fashion to elegance. Elegance is in the wilderness, and fashion is in the domestic.

Real elegance is everywhere, especially in the things that don't show.

There is but one art, to omit.

Actors tend to get better with age. You start cutting away the useless stuff and achieving a point of effortlessness and simplicity, which is all you want to do, with any art at all.

The real man lies in the depths of subconscious.

As someone who is obsessed with fashion, I personally own non-vegan materials and am very open about that. I don't think it's right to pretend to be someone you're not to get sales. People know me on a real level because of how open I am in my videos. It was a simple choice: I didn't want to exclude anyone, that wasn't fair. I wanted EVERY customer to be able to wear my art. And it's morally right. End of story.

With Dior Haute Couture, the dream is already there.

The civilized man is a more experienced and wiser savage.

All men are children, and if you understand that, a woman understands everything.

Ladies, you may not realize this, understand this, or even believe this, but everything else we do is ultimately for you. Men don't do anything-create art, build businesses, donate to charity, invent things, or do anything noteworthy-for any reason other than to impress women, and thus get them to have sex with us. If women didn't exist, we'd still just be naked grunting apes living in caves. In a very real way, pussy is the key to human civilization. You don't have to like it, but it's a fact; if you understand it, you understand men.

Beauty is our business.

I have no interest in problematizing things. So what I am writing to is that simple sense of being human in myself.

The brown paper bag is the only thing civilized man has produced that does not seem out of place in nature.

You may hang your walls with tapestry insread of whitewash or paper; or you may cover them with mosaic; or have them frescoed by a great painter: all this is not luxury, if it be done for beauty's sake, and not for show: it does not break our golden rule: Have nothing in your houses which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful.

Money does not make you look expensive, it’s taste.

The nude alone is well dressed

But for me, dinner at a fine restaurant was the ultimate luxury. It was the very height of civilization. For what was civilization but the intellect's ascendancy out of the doldrums of necessity (shelter, sustenance and survival) into the ether of the finely superfluous (poetry, handbags and haute cuisine)? So removed from daily life was the whole experience that when all was rotten to the core, a fine dinner could revive the spirits. If and when I had twenty dollars left to my name, I was going to invest it right here in an elegant hour that couldn't be hocked.

I love luxury. And luxury lies not in richness and ornateness but in the absence of vulgarity. Vulgarity is the ugliest word in our language. I stay in the game to fight it.

I think elegance is always going to be there.

In here, the human bosom -- mine, yours, everybody's -- there isn't just one soul. There's a lot of souls. But there are two main ones, the real soul and a pretender soul. Now! Every man realizes that he has to love something or somebody. He feels that he must go outward. 'If thou canst not love, what art thou?' Are you with me?

There are fine things that are more brilliant when they are unfinished than when finished too much.

True elegance becomes the more so as it approaches simplicity.

An infinite question is often destroyed by finite answers. To define everything is to annihilate much that gives us laughter and joy... If I try self-consciously to become a person, I will never be one. The most real people, those who are able to forget their selfish selves, who have true compassion, are usually the most distinct individuals